Scriptorium Daily
It is easy to forget that science is not the only way, or even the most important way, to learn. Shakespeare can teach us as much as any physics text and on subjects of greater importance.
Knowing what a thing is made of, after all, does not tell us what it is.
Scientists, even those who are Christian can fall into the dangerous trap of worshiping science. If such men can account for the visible world, then they rest content. Monstrous evils done in scientific experimentation, such as human cloning, are justified simply because they are scientific.
Literature, the fine arts, theater, and music teach humans what it is to be good, true, and beautiful. They point to meaning. What does it profit a man to learn all mysteries of matter and energy if he does not have love? Science can only simulate or stimulate the feelings of love, but they cannot create one real passion.
Without the humanities, a queen is just a woman, a husband is just a man, and romance just procreation. Meaning is created by persons, gods and men, and cannot arise like a swamp gas from mindless matter.
Philosophy has always been tempted by two extremes: idealism and materialism. Some thinkers wish to make everything an ideal. Matter is but a dream.
So fundamental is the sense of personhood and meaning, that it is easier to believe that matter and energy are the product of mind than that mind is the product of matter.
Study of the classics, required of all the first scientists in places like Victorian England, is a waste of time. They assume the philosophy of the Bible is somehow self-authenticating. Some even go as far as to believe that only scientific authentication is important. Fortunately, parallel to the Intelligent Design movement has been resurgence in the practice of classical philosophy and apologetics led by scholars such as J.P. Moreland, William Lane Craig, and Craig Hazen.
Because the crisis with science has been so pronounced, few apologists and philosophers have failed to account for the relationship of Christianity with the visible world. Sadly, the education of those working in science has not kept pace in the area of humanities. The philosophers of early Greece and Rome used to be the common intellectual property of all college graduates. This is no longer the case, but scientists do not know what they are missing. Shakespeare may be unknown to a scientist, but he feels no sense of shame. However, he would rightly feel distressed by a “well educated” person who had no idea of the history or methods of science.
Nor is it simply that the classical philosophical and literary education will make one a “better person” in some way distinct from the work of science. Better philosophers are better scientists. How many brilliant scientific ideas have been cut short by the ugly and unreflective scientism picked up in graduate school by scientists? One shudders to think. Of course, it is also not a small thing that philosophy and the humanities can make a better citizen. In a republic like the United States, it is not a good thing when influential voters are almost entirely ignorant of soul work.
Christianity is congenial to both the sciences and the humanities without making a god of one or the other. Christianity unites the two parts of the University. It cares about and makes claims about the visible world. Christians are not religious neo-Platonists. This is a philosophy the best of the Fathers rejected, after serious consideration, as sub-Christian. On the other hand, Christians are not mystical Epicureans. The Fathers believe in an invisible world even more important than the visible. Traditional Christianity must unite the sciences and the humanities.
Can science sustain itself without traditional Christianity? In individual cases, it certainly can, but culturally it is unlikely. If a new dark age comes, it will be because barbarians no longer can practice the virtues or understand the humanities that make scientific men and the culture that sustains them possible.
Christopher Hitchens, or any of the new atheists who attack Christianity with more heat than light, is not the main opponent of Christian civilization. Instead, it is the loss of the imagination and hope for something better that infected the church long before Hitchens was born. If we were doing our job, then Hitchens would have no force.
The combination of science and the humanities in the ancient Christian university came from the love of God. If a man loved God, then he had to love the men and the cosmos God made.
Poets like Dante presented the best science of their day in the greatest poetry written up to that point. The failure of Christendom was to maintain that balance. The result was horrific.
